My mother had three older brothers. The one closest in age to her was a poet, Malcolm Miller. I started to write this post last year, but trying to describe him with words felt like trapping smoke in a net.

When Malcolm was in high school he felt he wasn't learning anything and opened the window and jumped out. He then got a full scholarship to St. John's Prep, an interesting education for a Jewish boy. He went to college at McGill in Montreal, and in the '60's and '70's wrote three poetry books, 'The Summer of the True Gods', 'The Kings Have Donned Their Final Masks' and 'The Emperor of Massachusetts.' Tundra Books published them.

In the '60's he married Sandra, a Canadian Indian, and they rented a house in Rockport, Mass. Sandra had miles long black hair and wore suede, fringed, beaded clothes. I'd gaze up at her and wonder if she was Cher. They had a beagle, Joey, and one of my earliest memories ever is walking Joey with Mal while everyone else is back at their house. Sandra is there making a salad.

This memory then shifts to a horror wax museum in Salem. I'm looking at a woman suspended by a giant hook through her gut, arced backward over a stone slab covered with blood. I try to bury my eyes in his jacket pocket, but his pocket is too high. I only come up to his thigh. His told me there was beauty in everything and I had to learn to see it. He knew I'd be an artist.

Sandra got sick and went back to Montreal for the healthcare. She died and I remember being about 8, in the car with my mother, driving Malcolm to Boston, to get on a ship. He was headed for England, to get away. He traveled to Barcelona, through Europe, back to Spain. He'd send me matches and spare change from around the world. His postcard from Fez said, 'I must confez that Fez is fezinating.'

He went to Canada for a while and lived on Leonard Cohen's couch. He asked Leonard Cohen to write my grandmother letters and he would, the dryest things I've seen.

I turned 9, 10, 11 and in the summers my mother would drive me to the train station in Salem to meet Mal. He and I would train to Gloucester, we'd walk a few miles to Good Harbor Beach then walk back to town. I'd be tired, whining and he'd be talking, oblivious to me. Mal never talked about himself and he didn't tell stories, but he did all the talking. Beauty, sex, the world, in a New England drawl that had a rhythm and rumble like nothing I'd heard. I'd listen, most of it going over my head. In town we'd hit a fisherman's bar, his favorite, and he'd drink cognac and I'd drink fake coffee, lots of milk and a little caffeine. By his eighth cognac I'd be shaking, afraid to use the bathroom, the little bits of coffee adding up to a blood running jolt, and he'd still be talking. "There's a big difference between being bright and being smart," he'd say. My feet would throb. He'd check out the waitress and her ass, then any female ass that passed by the bar, talking, talking, talking.

He'd disappear again, back to Montreal, to Barcelona. He was always writing. Malcolm never stopped writing.

When I was 13 I came home from school and saw a tent pitched in the backyard. Mal was staying there with his new girlfriend. Two days later they were gone; a year later he was back in the tent with a new girlfriend. He wouldn't stay in the house, but would come in to eat. He was like a wild animal, never to be tamed by normal.

My mother and her brothers, they were all a little wacky. A little nuts. Maybe one or two could even be diagnosed as having a touch of mental illness. Each had their eccentricities, all contained under the umbrella of their equally eccentric mother, my grandmother. There were no father figures. All the husbands and fathers, including mine, died young.

When I was a full on teenager, sitting at a drive-in high with my friends, screaming my head off as Jason slashed his way down Elm Street, the ballet of blood flying two stories high, I remembered that woman with the hook through her gut and saw he was right.

I went away to college. His brothers and sister didn't see him that much. Malcolm now lived with his mother, on her couch, and if they came to visit he'd be sure to be gone. He was the favorite and I sensed they envied Mal. Their mother, my grandmother, was one of those women who you could never really know, her self-sufficiency was so thick. Maybe they thought he finally broke through her crust, but the way I saw it, there wasn't a crust to break through. It's hard for me to say this, why I'm not sure, but my mother, her brothers and mother had a narcissism so encompassing, so complete, that in time it became almost became endearing. Almost.

He loved that I went to art school. I knew this because he started stealing art books and sending them to me. About five years after I moved here he came to visit. It was another ten years before I saw him again.

All our family except me thought he was crazy. He didn't work, had no money, no phone number, and the few clothes he had were my father's, given to Mal after my father died. All Mal had was a typewriter, which he wrote on daily. He'd still travel now and then, moving through the world alone. He still lived at his mother's and was supposedly using a room at Salem State University to write in.

From the late '80s to mid '90s I called my grandmother every Sunday. Only once in a great while would Mal get on the phone. He didn't like talking on one, and instead he would sometimes loudly comment on whatever she said to me, then I'd comment back and she'd pass what I said to him. My grandmother would end up in the middle of this abstract phone call, her sense of practicality up in arms.

Mal was robust and his walk was an inch from swagger. When he wasn't writing, he was walking. Occasionally, people my mother knew would see him. A friend of her's saw him walking down Lafeyette Street in a lab coat with a doctor's name stitched on the pocket. He probably stole it out of a science lab at the college. Mal was handsome, doubly so in a crisp white lab jacket, and as women smiled hello he'd nod back, then gesture as if he had rounds to get to.

He was self publishing at this point, printing typed copies of books and selling them to libraries, universities, McGill. I think he was starting to feel troubled inside. I got a call that he disappeared from his mother's house, no one could find him. Two weeks later he showed up after living on the streets in Boston. My uncle Harvey drove down and put him in the Danvers State Hospital, an asylum in my hometown that was a Gothic terror, all spires and gargoyles. I knew it well; when my friends and I were teenagers we used to eat mescalin and sneak in at night to scare the shit out of ourselves.

He checked himself out of Danvers State after six weeks and told me he was doing research for a play. He seemed normal as sunshine, at least to me.

My grandmother eventually went into a nursing home and Mal would sleep in a chair in her room during the day. When they reno'd the nursing home and had to move her he was found living in the construction trailer. When she died he needed help and my mother and uncles wouldn't help him. Granted, he was so far off the grid it took chance to find him. Once when I was up there visiting from NY my mother and I drove around Salem looking everywhere, without luck.

I started Googling him, trying to find him. There'd be occasional sightings in Salem -- he'd be seen rolling up Essex Street or somewhere in Salem center. Supposedly he looked okay, like he was staying somewhere.

There was a rumor he had a girlfriend and lived with her.

The next few years my mother got sick, I started going up there a lot, she got sicker and in 2010 died. Shortly after, I resumed looking for him online, then started looking online in the local Salem papers. He was once donned the 'Poet of Salem' and maybe he'd be donned something else in print. Over the next couple of months I kept searching, and then I found a letter to the editor of the Salem News. It was signed Malcolm Miller:

February 28, 2011

To the Editor:

Salem's new motto, "still making history," is brilliantly puzzling. Opening a new yarn shop or restaurant is not exactly making history. While tourism dollars exist, so do people's sense of the mystery of being alive moment by moment without having to "make history."

Malcolm Miller Salem

There he was! I still couldn't find an address for him, but every few months there'd be a new letter published. It's how I tracked him. A few favorites:

February 20, 2013

To the Editor:

Is there anything sadder than talk shows? Is there anything more revealing of the banality of opinions? Silence, you are an improvement.

Malcolm Miller Salem

March 29, 2013

To the Editor:

Despite the media trying like anything to declare a great reckoning and powerful moment in church history, the truth is somewhat different and intrudes awkwardly as we pass closed churches. We have come to a historical crossroad at which the presence of God will rise in a new, greater way or disappear forever. The official church is not as alive as the sunlight tingling the late-winter air with gold. The poetry of being alive has won out over doctrine.

Malcolm Miller Salem

His letters also started showing up in the Jewish Journal, otherwise known as 'Your Community Newspaper.' My favorite of all, dated January 30, 2014:

MY COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER?

I have read the entire January 16 edition of the Journal and found no mention of me. Something is wrong. Please correct this shortcoming.

I got into a bi-monthly rhythm where I'd look for him and his letters. Reading his words I could hear his voice; he was as alive on the page as he had been in the flesh. He had such an influence on me; I'd be so excited to find a letter. I was looking for a clue to where he might be, I so wanted to see him. In November I did my usual search and instead I found his obituary. He had died in September.

Stunned, shocked - I was sure I'd see him again. Malcolm was invulnerable, to the world around him, to poverty, to what I imagined was a lack of love. I always thought Sandra dying made him eternally restless. He never spoke of it. I had hoped to sit with him with my own presence fully emerged, to be with Mal as Mal was, as I was. The enormity of his death also drove home that he was the last of my mother's immediate family. Now they were all gone.

A memorial was happening a few days after I found his obit, and I wasn't able to go. A week later I looked online for any record of it and found something written by a retired English professor from Salem State College, Rod Kessler. I found an address for him and reached out. Rod wrote back and we started writing.

Mal had been self-publishing books - hand writing poems and making copies of them, then dropping them off in mail slots to English professors at a local community college. He'd include a note: if you like the poems, please send $5 to a PO Box. Rod was one of the professors. He didn't read the poems, but over the years sent $5 whenever he received a booklet. Then Mal wrote a note to all that he was 80 (he was 83 when he died) and the booklet of poems they were receiving may be his last.

This spurred Rod to read them and when he did he was impressed. He started reading all of them, then asked Mal to come and speak at the college. Mal wouldn't, citing his health, but I imagine Mal wouldn't do this anyway. Rod visited him once, I believe they stayed in touch via letters, and then Rod got the call that Mal was found dead by his Meals on Wheels person. Rod was one of his emergency contacts.

Mal's other emergency contact, Peter Urkowitz, worked in the library at Salem State. Mal lived in public housing the last few years of his life (the same housing my grandmother lived in), but I learned that prior to this Mal would write all night in a coffee shop, then sleep in the library at Salem State. When Mal burned out his typewriter and couldn't afford a new one, Peter lent Mal his apartment every morning so Mal could go in and use his typewriter.

Two weeks ago there was a huge poetry festival in Salem and Rod wanted to do a panel on Malcolm. He asked me to come and speak, and I did. Joe and Ginger came with me and came to the panel, and it was so meaningful to see Mal celebrated, to hear people read his poetry, to see him loved. I don't know how he would have felt about it. Chances are he wouldn't have shown up.

Prior to the festival Joe and I and Ginger went to the cemetery and for the first time I saw my parents graves side by side. I have enough grief writing this one, so I'll save that story for another time.

A few of Mal's poems, from an anthology Rod Kessler put together for the panel:

dilemma

a lousy soul has just chucked

a stupid bottle that once held

a soft drink onto a perfect

beautiful grass lawn

I am at first startled

and angered by this and almost

blame the bottle

then I grow aware it is also

has a certain beautiful

shapely existence

I gaze at it with pleasure

strangely I can’t retain now

my rage at the piggish lout

who threw the bottle

I should and I am unsteadied

by this whole experience

        Your Life is Over, 2007, p. 12

---

crimes

a little old lady in Boston

town had her hand

bag torn away from her shoulder

the culprit made

off down back alleys

all she had in it was a small

new testament

the culprit out of curiosity

read it over and over

now he does more damage

as a preacher man

than he did on the streets

of Boston

robbing and hitting

how about that

Poems, July 2012, p. 31

---

the rice

I saw a just married couple emerging

from a church on a beautiful sunny day

and friends threw rice

you know

to ensure fertility or something

but the rice got in the groom's eye

he had to be rushed to the hospital

the honeymoon was called off

he was lucky not to lose the eye

now a year later the divorce is underway

I am plagued by thoughts

the rice did it

I want to find out

my curiosity is almost painful

how can I find out?

No Dust Can Gather on the Mouths of Women, 2009, p. 54

---

some things

are too

true to

be right

once it took meaning

to stop despair

now a tree will do

a flash of sun on water

at times nothing

is better than something

most people are not serious

only careful

instead of winning 8

straight why don't

the boston red sox

read my poetry

 No Dust Can Gather on the Mouths of Women, 2009, p.6

---

BUT

there is a speck

of gold in all

that sand

but you have to spend

so much of your life

failing grain

by grain to find it

the River of Muddied Water Bears Gold, 1994, p. 50

---

letter to the world

I am spending a day

of beautiful indolence

at home alone

the fan is whirring

I am in this heat bereft

of duds and duties

a beachcomber under a palm

tree who catches

a falling coconut

splits it neatly and drinks

the cool milky beverage

outside it is sun

struck and clammy

as I spend a day of beautiful

indolence gazing

at my little sky

I have removed the smoke

detector from the ceiling

a criminally expensive

cigar is being patiently

destroyed by a gentleman

within me who writes poems and hopes

you are well

The Good Rain of Canada, 1994, p.30

I never thought trying to find a house to buy would be this tough.

The most recent place we found was a barn that had been partially converted for living. It needed a lot of work, but it was affordable. Joe reached out to the broker, the work it needed wasn't daunting, and we started talking about going upstate to see it. Then, in an aerial view, I saw a large installation of buildings a quarter-mile up the road. Streetview revealed nothing, so I started researching what the buildings might be. It turned out to be a 'bionics' laboratory, which means lots of testing on rats and mice. We're leaving NY to get away from the rats, not to live amongst nuclear ones that may have escaped. The barn went off our list.

I fell in love with a late 1800's Italianate with a giant porch. It's in the middle of a charming village in the Catskills, in a quiet town an artist I know lives in. I called her and we spoke for almost an hour about how great the area is, how brutal the winters, hows it's easy to get to NYC, about the theatre and creative community. At the end of our conversation she casually mentioned how "the downtown area floods every five years or so and it's still a mess from the last flood." Poof went the Italianate.

In the same town was an amazing old Federal style brick commercial building. It sits where the floods roar in.

It's not that we're not aware of flooding. Our house hunting trip to Catskill made us very aware of flooding and we now check everything against FEMA floodmaps to see what's in the flood zone. What we're finding, though, is water doesn't always go where it has in the past. Even though new maps are being drawn up, not everything that floods shows up as being in the flood zone. (During Hurricane Sandy, the water came exactly to where the New York City flood map showed it would. We watched the whitecaps wave across Hudson Street from our living room.)

Over the last few months we found a house that had a massive power station hidden just up the road, and another house that turned out to be near land that may become a giant wind farm. I started reading the notes from the town council meetings and discovered projects for a pipeline and an even bigger power station that are in the works, though these could take years. Friends who bought a house in a town I love said they can hear farm turbines and other machinery from half a mile away. When the wind blows a certain way they can even smell it. They don't mind, though, and rack it up to country living.

NYC is loud and ripe and lately all I can hear are sirens and horns. When I ask friends upstate about quiet they laugh and say nothing's as noisy as the quiet. But it's a great quiet: the birds wake them at 4:30 and when the volunteer fire dept. horn blares at noon it's a unifiying sound, not an intrusion. We're getting to the point where we have to do our due diligence and then hope for the best. But I'm cutting and running at rats. Especially bionic ones.

What a difference a week makes.

Randee Sue Phillips is an amazing knitter. She's also an amazing friend. When I mentioned Ginger's ears got cold on these freezing days she whipped up a little ear warmer for her.

Up north is getting astounding amounts of snow, but we're getting more of a slushy ice mix. Which then freezes. The sidewalks are covered in chemicals to melt the ice and the streets are filled with salt, and all of it burns paws. We tried the blue balloon booties, which are good for two or three wearings. We then went hardcore with real boots, but once she got used to them and started prancing around they came right off. She can feel the ground through the balloon booties and they stay put, so we're back to those for now. What do you use for your pup's feet in salt?

What are rat chips, you ask?

Take one large rat, preferably the size of a cat. Hit it with a car then run it over 30 or 40 times until it's nice and flat. Let it freeze completely and get buried under snow. Then walk Ginger.

We were walking, enjoying the fresh snow, then bam! Her face was in and out of the snow, rat chip clenched in her jaws. We start rolling on the snow, I'm fighting to take my mittens off so I can grab at the rat chip with my bare hands, Ginger's prancing the length of the leash just out of reach. Neighbors with cats are horrified. Neighbors with dogs nod knowingly. I eventually won and got the chip, but what exactly did I win.

I love birthdays and Facebook.

I'm rarely on FB, and every time my birthday rolls around I wonder why I'm not. The generous culture of it floors me - happy birthday, like like like! But I also love how technocellular is it, i.e. I may see the guts and string of my life, but I also get to see yours.

This year the first birthday wishes came from friends far away, friends who live in time zones where their tomorrow is still our today. My Aussie friend is a newer friend and work acquaintance who posts pics with his boyfriend, his dog and the design work he does for a magazine. He's a screenwriter, a good one, but he posts nothing about that ever.

An old friend now lives in Zurich. I say now because I consider her a good friend, yet she moved there over twenty years ago and I've seen her maybe twice since. Seeing her online makes me go to her homepage and holy sh!t there's her brother! A flash of a vague memory erupts, we're in our twenties, maybe at The Ballroom, maybe it was Area. Her daughters are close to twenty and look at them! They're gorgeous!

High school FB friends start posting birthday wishes, the early risers first. Most of them I barely knew in high school - I was a burn out and they weren't, but my town was small and I've known most of this group since kindergarten. I feel a swell of love for them, as I do every year. One always posted about her husband and kids, then about two years ago her posts went through a one day at a time feel, a today is the first day of the rest of your life vibe. Divorce? AA? I look at her homepage and take a closer look. She looks good. She looks clean and sober. I hear you on that one, sister who I don't know, but do.

I get a private happy birthday message from another acquaintance from way back when, someone who lives in a small New England town and always has. Small Town Guy is married, but has been in the closet forever. I know this because a close friend here in NYC (and FB) who's far out of the closet emailed me some time ago and asked why my Small Town Guy who he doesn't know and never met is trying to friend him. That's when I realize that Small Town Guy has a secret life and must be trying to find a community he can be less secret in, albeit online. I feel a pang of sadness for him. Then I think damn, you're hiding in the LGBTQ (is for questioning) world of today? But, see, lately I've become aware of just how much angst I have over how others see me, how I sand down my aggressive corners or how I have a moment of panic when someone posts a photo I'm in where I don't look great.

That thought pinballs me to, do my business acquaintances and friends know how old I am?! I go to my FB account and there's my birthday date. With the year I was born. Does the year show?! Fu@k it. Does the year show? Fu@k it.

I get a post from a high school acquaintance - she's a grandmother?! How old am I? Soon after there's a post from a friend the same age who has a six-week old baby. How relieved am I?

I start scrolling my general feed. There's a post from the first studio visit I ever had. This guy posts everything - nothing is off limits - which I love. Small Town Guy should definitely friend him. There's a post from the first curator who put me in a show. You never forget your first. Oh! My work has gone up at auction (it sold well, thank you very much) and I've shown in non-profits. Those fu@kers always post the year. My birthday is out there.

Egad. Get off the age thing. Look at these people I went to high school with. We look great!

Scrolling more, there's the guy I lost my virginity to. When FB was a novelty we said hello! Hello! I lost my virginity at the Swiss Chalet attached to a Denny's. The following morning there was a knock at the door from the chambermaid. Being polite I opened the door and the chambermaid was the guy who sat behind me in homeroom. I screamed and slammed the door shut. I think I'm FB friends with that chambermaid ...

Right after I see my de-virginizer's post I get birthday wishes from the girl I met him through. Her mother and mine were great friends. And that sends me down the rabbit hole of remembrance: This girl's best friend ended up working for my stepfather, Nachum, a Holocaust survivor. He was much older than my mother and they were opposites in every way, except when it came to feeling feelings. Which was don't. My stepfather had a factory that blew up - oh my god she looks amazing! A post shows a picture of a woman I went to high school with who was a quiet little wallflower. Sh!t did she blossom.

Posts are like shiny objects - I look at that and that, then jump the tracks to that. My friends are interesting and funny and are in the world, so I read the articles you post, I look at your pictures. Yet all that bouncing around makes a piece of me click off and I need to step away. It's why I'm not on FB much.

When I'm in the studio working, whether writing or drawing or handling the business of writing and drawing, I'm all in, distractions off. When I'm not working I need time to stare off and do nothing. Living in New York City with its constant hum contributes to this need for pause, but living here also lets me spontaneously meet friends for coffee and lunch and stuff going on locally. If we move out of New York City my relationship to FB will change for sure. Maybe then my post-birthday like of Facebook will sustain itself for longer than a week. I hope so. I really do.

What I want to bring into the new year with me and what I want to leave behind:

In: The HBO series 'Getting On.'

No-one seems to have heard of it, yet it's one of the best shows on TV right now. It's a comedy and a drama, often at the same time, and I've never seen anything like it. I've wept watching this show, both from laughing so hard and from, well, crying.

Out: I pray to be less neurotic about Ginger.

Oh my god her toe is red. Oh my god she's making a hacking sound. Is she peeing more than usual? She's shaking her head funny - does she have a head cold? Is that a limp; does she look sad right now; she has gas - did she eat something off the street? Losing Opal has made me desperate to not lose this one. Ginger is a happy dog, a well cared for dog, a healthy dog. Chances are she'll be waking us up at 5:30 every morning for many years to come.

In: Trust my gut more.

I have an uncanny gut. I'll know things. I'll see things that may not be there, but are there. It's time to accept it and trust it more than I currently do. I'm quick to know I can be way off or totally wrong. Usually though, my crazy thoughts bear some truth. Go with them.

In: I'm very grateful that my home life of Joe, Ginger, what I do for a living and how we live, is solid. My friends, too, are very meaningful to me. This year I became more aware of how lucky I am.

Out: Fury and hurt and grief over my sister.

I have an older sister. She's my last immediate family member still alive. For context, my grandparents, uncles and almost everyone else except a few cousins and favorite auntie are also dead. (I feel too young to have no family, but it's how it went.)

The last time I saw my sister was four years ago, at our mother's funeral. It was also the last time we spoke. We never had a time where we were close, but in the three years taking care of our mother I harbored hope that we'd get through our differences. My sister still lived in the area we were born in, and from frequently going back to see my mother I got to know my sister very well. We are extremely different, opposites even, and not in the cute way that opposites can compliment each other. I tried to get closer to her, but she didn't want a friendship. I kept thinking she's my sister, so no matter what keep hoping we'll work it out.

Then, I started to change shortly before my mother passed. It was so hard for me to even think that I may not like her, or that it was okay that we weren't going to have a relationship. It was also hard to feel the hurt that she wanted nothing with me. She was my big sister, yet I always saw her as fragile and felt maternal toward her, protective. Yet at the end my mother took all my focus and my sister simply became a person in my life. I didn't feel good or bad about her; she registered, but no longer in a fraught or emotional way. Driving back to New York from the funeral with my friends, I felt okay that I wouldn't see her again. I even felt relief.

Five months later, the fury started. It'd come from nowhere, being so fuck*ng angry at her. It'd dissipate, come back, vanish for months at a time, suddenly show it's head then vanish again. This time when the anger came up it briefly shifted to hurt, which shifted to sadness. It bounced around there for a few months, then last week it hit me that it is what it is and it's time to find acceptance with it. Seeing this has let the rage go and with it, I will say sadly, thinking about her. Something has shifted and it feels like I'm moving on.

In: I want to go to the movies more instead of streaming everything on the box. Going to the movies alone in the middle of the day is a decadent joy. There's a great theater near me that is clean and has stadium seating and the crowds tend to be light and respectful of whatever is showing. Seeing a movie on a huge screen is incomparable. I want to put my shoes on and go go go.

Everything else in my life, i.e. art and writing and teaching and consulting and my writing group and greenmarkets and this blog and you dear readers and Netflix and Joe's family and all the stuff that makes my world spin is coming with me. And the meatballs Joe's about to make. This was a good eating year and starting a new one with meatballs sets it up well.

The happiest New Year to all. May you bring good things into the new year with you.

Ginger does love her Fluff And Tuff stuffies. That line-up of carcasses above may look wretched, yet there's still plenty of tug-o-war and ripping to be had.

We just got her two new stuffies for the holiday and the kind commandant of Fluff And Tuff sent our little Ginger extras. It means Ginger will be in the disembowel business well into January.

I want to thank you all for reading and for commenting. I love reading your comments and hopefully soon we'll tweak the design so I can comment on your comments in a more streamlined way than I do now.

The happiest holidays to all. I still think it's March and can't believe we're barreling toward the end of 2014. Was this the quickest year ever?

(photo by AFP)

Last weekend's protest filled twenty blocks. That's a mile-deep group of people that marched up Fifth Avenue, over to Sixth Avenue, up to Thirty-Second Street, and then down Broadway for over thirty blocks. Yet the mainstream press barely covered it. When they did they wrote about a handful of arrests that occurred at the end of the day by a splinter group. That wasn't the real story. It was the gossipy part of the story.

Similar reportage has been playing out regarding the Sony hack. I can't stop reading about it, but not because of the personal details released - these fritter into the air and are done. (This said, I do find interesting the details of men's pay versus women's, and how certain projects come together and fall apart.) It's, an email threat to a movie studio demands the studio pull a movie because it makes fun of the North Korean president, and the movie studio pulls the movie right before its release. What does this mean for freedom of speech? (This story is starting to get traction. I read a great quote by George Clooney: "We cannot be told we can’t see something by Kim Jong-un, of all f*cking people.")

Most of the coverage concerning the hack has focused on how embarrassing the leaked emails have been for those who wrote them. Yet right now, in front of the whole world, a new kind of war is being waged: A cyber war. We have no context for this, since we've never been here before. It's taken almost a month for this aspect of the story to show up on some front pages of mainstream press.

The Sony hack has moved us into the future. We don't know how to fight this war, what the end of it might look like, who else might get yanked into it, or how it might resonate on a global scale. The world we know has changed.

(top photo by Joe Villari)

A year ago today, we adopted Ginger. I remember holding her in my lap as we drove down the FDR, her little head pivoting to see all the buildings, the cars, us. She came into our apartment and jumped right on her bed, but it took her a few months before she knew for sure she was home.

She still follows Joe around the house, she often wakes us up in the dead of night to get a pet of reassurance, and she still likes to come down the stairs with her nose wedged against the back of my knee. She's a toucher, this one, which I love. Sometimes I look at her and can't imagine all those years I didn't have a dog.

                                ***

Joe's niece was in town from LI today to visit Santa at Macy's. It was a two hour wait to get in his lap. I said, "Convert to Judaism and go sit on Hannukah Harry's lap. He's giving out Dreidels. There'll be no wait." She said, "I'm asking Santa for big stuff. Get me Jenga."

A few nights ago there was a staged 'Die-In' at Macy's to protest police brutality and I was relieved nothing happened while the little one was there. However, her older sister went to the Wax Museum with a friend and I thought it would be great if she saw some kind of action or protest. They're from a sheltered area and although the city is a quick train ride away it's a continent away. Chances are they don't know what a Dreidel is. I know the little one would've converted if she did.